Bravo You Zero

Souness had given me the old VHS tape, telling me I really had to watch it, that I’d be astonished at what I see.  Well, all I saw was a jumble of odd images: ladders, a cliff, a close up of Neil Lennon’s teeth and then a strange glowing ring which fair took me back to my nights in Bennets with Gordon Matheson.  When the tape finished my phone rang and a grasping voice on the other end said, ‘Seven days’.  At first I thought it was Lawwell as he’s well known for spending all day on the blower to journalists and editors, making all kinds of threats but it couldn’t have been him because the line went dead and Peter usually spends a little time detailing exactly what he’s going to do to you if you don’t toe the Celtic line when it comes to reporting any outrages perpetrated by Celtic players, the Celtic support or even Lawwell himself – hasn’t Allan Rennie’s Daily Record not pulled off a masterstroke this week alone by making it seem that the Rangers tribute to the Armed Forces is somehow seen as anathema while the Celtic supports’ disgracing of simple acts of remembrance goes unreported three years in a row?

So for seven days I began to experience curious visions and every day the phone would ring and the same voice would count down the week with me wondering what on earth would happen at the end of it.  I put it to the back of my mind though and got on with weighing in behind the Record and calling the Rangers Remembrance Day match, ‘a circus’, ‘a jamboree’ and ‘daft stuff’, all on Twitter of course because I don’t really have a full time job at the moment, relying mainly on bit parts in the Herald and BBC Scotland because, well because I’m just as big a Rangers hater as anyone in those two once great institutions laid low by Celtic supporters gaining influential positions and employing and promoting only their own.  It’s like Common Purpose in green and white hoops if you get my drift?

When the final day of my countdown came I was fortuitous to be dining with Tom Devine at his west end townhouse.  When I say dining, I was dining and he was drinking Port from a bucket and tossing the occasional scrap from his plate into the corner where Elaine C Smith was chained to the wall.  I was there to discuss the SPL Independent Inquiry into the Rangers side letters and Tom was looking smug.  ‘They can’t possibly find Rangers guilty,’ I said, enjoying the succulent chicken.  ‘Not after they won the Big Tax Case – not even Doncaster and Regan are that mad.’

‘You credit Doncaster and Regan with too much free will,’ burped old Tom, spitting on the floor.  ‘They’re a pair of golems doing their master’s wishes, that’s all.  No matter how outrageous the decision, how flimsy the evidence, how completely and utterly against the notions of fairness and decency, that panel is going to find Rangers guilty and demand titles in recompense.’

‘But that’ll mean war with Rangers,’ I squeaked.

'You think we’re not at war with them already?’ he sneered and then paused and stared over my shoulder to the far corner of the room.  I turned and gasped in horror: the television had turned itself on and in the screen was the horrible vision of a grotesque woman, hair covering her face, arm reaching out towards us and that’s when I noticed the arm was sticking out of the screen.

She climbed out of the television, dripping wet, hair matting the face disguising her features but I knew that underneath it was a face so awful that it would haunt my dreams forever.  She crawled along the floor, arms and hands at impossible angles, her movement stunted almost crablike.

‘Oh gawd, it’s coming for me, it’s coming for me Devine – do something, save me!’ I cried and Devine to his credit got up from the table and strode towards the malevolent thing that was straining to get close to me and he grabbed its nighty and howked it up revealing its nakedness.  ‘Aha!’ he exclaimed.  ‘A bush like an angry Russian, it can mean only one thing,’ and he pulled the thing’s hair back and revealed...  Angela Haggerty!

Then he took her upstairs and she gave him the ride of his life, the bed hammering the walls so hard that the chandelier nearly came down on me from the ceiling so I got up and made myself scarce, pausing only briefly to reassure Elaine C Smith who was whimpering in the corner.